CakePHP design thoughts

I am working on a project in CakePHP...the first time I have used it. I am finding it very well made, but I am not exactly in the right frame of mind for some of its limitations.

Malware removal

I have had the pleasure of removing malware from a few friends computers lately (Windows XP). In the two most recent cases, they were heavily infected with phony antivirus software and alerts. They probably clicked the "you are infected" popups and it escalated from there.

In both cases, I used MalwareBytes to remove the offensive stuff. The free version can do a full scan in a few hours and seems to a solid job of sniffing stuff out and removing it.

 I have found that you have to run the scans several times, both as the administrator and as the actual user to find everything. I just scanned and rebooted repeatedly until I could see no trace of the stuff left.

I think that XP was more prone to these kinds of things than later versions (or than Linux or Mac) because of the permissions. We'll see if the rollout of Windows 7 reduces my friends infections. (I am running Linux, so all I have to worry about is making my system so complicated I can't use it anymore.)

Drupal modules

Here is a good overview of must-have Drupal modules.

Underhanded C

The Underhanded C Contest is great. This year's contest is out...you have to write code to surreptitiously lose luggage. I wonder if I can remember enough C coding to enter...

Nokia N900

I've had my Nokia N900 for about a day now, and I can report that it is an awesome phone. It is the ideal geek phone. I have never had a phone that I could drop into a command line if I wanted to. Not only that, but I can ssh into (or out of) the phone.

There are obviously not as many apps for this phone as there are for the iPhone or Windows (which my previous phone was), but nearly everything I used to use is there and many things are much easier (like the simple SSH connection to the phone, which makes transferring music or pictures on or off as easy as a network operation between two computers).

Apache virtual hosts

Just saw an article which helped me easily create a virtual host for Apache on a Debian install (Sites and Modules, Linux Format #126, p63, but I can't find the article online to link to it). In any case, it made setting up a virtual host on my Ubuntu laptop very simple. The article explained the debian setup for Apache.  The virtual host setups are in the sites-available directory (there is also a mods-available directory which works similarly to sites).

Drupal multisite

I needed to create a new website with Drupal.  I have existing basic hosting with drupal set up on the main site.  To extend it to add another website, I did the following:

Use fail2ban

If you have Linux with ssh exposed to the internet, fail2ban is a must.  I have a Linux VM which allows SSH connections via the internet.  It doesn't have a static ip address, but I am using dyndns to make it easier for me to access from outside.

Within a few days of opening the port on the firewall, the logs started filling with attempts to break in.  There are repeated attempts to login with an alphabetical list of usernames, all from an IP address which is located in China.  Fail2Ban lets you set limits on how many times a single IP address can fail login before that IP address is banned for some specific amount of time.

It is found in most of the repositories, and is easy to set up.  Check out the website for configuration details (http://www.fail2ban.org/)

Using Git locally for revisions and backups

Git is great. You will probably see me mention it alot here. Or you might not, since it is one of those tools that should just become invisible in the background. If you are used to working on a centralized version control system (like Subversion) you probably have a scenario like this:

• Create a branch on the server for your changes and copy from the trunk.
• Work locally, and periodically commit changes back to the branch as a backup.
• Merge the changes back to the trunk when they are ready.

That all works well. But when you are working on something locally (for example, some CakePHP web pages in a local www directory for your local apache installation) you want the same kinds of benefits: you want to be able to roll back to previous versions if needed and you want to have the assurance of backing up your code somewhere. In git, you can do those as two separate functions.